Stop Wasting Your Life and Start Gambling on BattleBots

In 2004, an actor named Faruq Tauheed received an acting credit for an episode of Cold Case in which he played a character named Simms, which happens to be my last name. Cosmically, I suppose that’s where it all began. Oh Faruq, poet laureate of the robot apocalypse. How bellicose your introductions ring through the battle box, how out of place your references land. Who else could so boldly compare the whirring of a glorified microwave to the storming of Normandy Beach? A linebacker in evening wear, Faruq Tauheed is the Michael Buffer for a combat sport with zero CTE and limitless WD-40. While Buffer asked raucous crowds whether they were ready to rumble, Faruq instead bellows, “Are you Yeti to rumble, going steady like Archie and Betty, hoping for an upsetty, his palms are sweaty, cold and ready, like mom’s spaghetti, it’s YETI!” I could run through a brick wall after hearing that. I nearly created a Robert-shaped hole in my cubicle wall after typing it.

Faruq is the latest mouthpiece of BattleBots, a television show that moonlights as a gateway drug for both Alita: Battle Angel and gambling addiction. Launched first on Comedy Central August 23, 2000, the show ran for five seasons until shuttering in December 2002. ABC picked up the show for sixth and seventh seasons in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Returning to enthusiastic reviews from a small but dedicated audience, the show was adopted by the Discovery and Science channels for an eighth season in 2018 and for the currently airing ninth season. I maintained a cursory interest in Bots during its earlier editions but it was only in 2016 that I really unleashed my depraved passion for robotic carnage. Like the sober guide of Burning Man acid trip who you eventually realize is very much not sober, Faruq was by my side the entire time.

You, in the TV room. Stockings still hang above the fireplace from Christmas. “They are a year-round decoration, don’t worry about it,” you say to your friends as they file in, beer in one hand, fistfulls of single dollar bills in the other. “BOTS BOTS BOTS,” you chant and stomp and dance. It would be alarming if it weren’t endearing. It’s people who spend time in the library expressing their emotions like people who spend time in the sports bar. It’s quiet people being loud. It’s unbridled silliness from generally serious people. As Debbie Liebling, Comedy Central’s Senior Vice President of original programming and development, mentioned when her network picked up the show, “it was really funny, and really nerdy...It was sports for the nerdy person.”

This crowd has gathered on Friday night for the purpose of not only consuming BattleBots but of cutting it with Bud Light and injecting it directly into our carotid arteries. Faruq welcomes us. There is only one rule when it comes to robot fighting time: money on the table. There are nearly endless things you can bet on. All you need is someone to bet with and a paperweight to place on top of your bills, which again, must be on the table.

Each battle includes bets on things like which bot will win, how the fight is decided, how long it takes, the composition of the two robotics teams, the number of rhymes in Faruq’s introductions, whether any team members wear costumes, and any number of other variables. Singles fly around. The only thing separating this scene from a strip club is the buffet. And the strippers. And the shame.

Earlier in this season I showed up without any bills. An angel investor gave me a single dollar to get me going. I turned it into $11 over the course of the night. The next session, I lost it all after a series of horrible, stupid, no good bets on Minotaur, Son of Whyachi, and Wan Hoo. So it goes. The safest bet in the entire extended BattleBots Cinematic Universe (BBCU) is a fidget-spinner/planet-eater named Tombstone. 250-pound incest baby of the Terminator and the Warriors’ Death Lineup, Tombstone began competing in 2015 and has accumulated a 90% career winning percentage since that time. His KO rate is 78%. In 2016 Tombstone buzz-sawed his way through the tournament, winning each of his six matches during his cakewalk to the title. His average match time that season was an ungodly 64 seconds. Tombstone has only lost twice, ever. I was there the second time. In the living room, I mean. I had money on him. I was devastated. It was horseshit.

Tombstone is driven by Ray Billings, who mixes the competitive bloodlust of 1986 Larry Bird with the physical composition of 2019 Larry Bird. He looks like Mitch McConnell if instead of killing election security bills, he killed the dreams of rival robotics enthusiasts. I cannot overstate this: Ray Billings is a goddamn assassin. The glee he finds in massacring rival microwaves is seductive and horrifying. Following a difficult but ultimately decisive victory earlier this season, Billings was asked if Tombstone was still the bot to beat. He replied, “Absolutely, of course I’m gonna win, that’s how this goes.” He’s probably right.

In a recent interview with Malcolm Gladwell, the author Michael Lewis said that “Sports is such a wonderful laboratory just because it’s so clean in so many ways.” I feel the same about BattleBots but for the opposite reason. The human element of a sport like basketball is obvious but the polished internal architecture of the game is what fascinates many of its most devoted fans. With BattleBots, the engineering is what takes center stage, and only when you dig beneath that metal exoskeleton do you discover the gritty humanity at the core of the sport. These machines are engineered with an immaculate precision that goes all the way out the window as soon as a match starts, so it really isn’t the clean wiring of the bot that makes it successful so much as the dirty wiring of its driver. No driver embodies this ugly survivorship better than Hal Rucker, the builder and driver of Duck!

By all accounts, Duck! isn’t a particularly good bot. It’s weapon is a lifting wedge that lacks both hydraulic intensity and defensive utility. Its armor is virtually non-existent and the bot is basically a DVD player with a beak. Duck! should never win. And yet, Hal Rucker’s misfit fowl is 5-2 in its career with its only losses coming to the historically dominant Tombstone and the prolific launcher of Bronco. In the fourth episode of this current season, Duck! was getting ragdolled by Cobalt, a robust bot with a front wedge and a violent vertical spinner. For the first two full minutes of the fight, Cobalt was not only taking Duck! to the woodshed, it was burning down the woodshed with Duck! inside it. Duck! had lost its beak, the massacre was on. And then...Cobalt got stuck on the floor of the battle box and couldn’t move. And if you can’t move, you can’t fight. The match was ruled a knockout in favor of Duck! Rucker openly acknowledged his bot didn’t deserve to win. He was wrong. Heart is a skill. In that moment, and throughout its career, Duck! has been much like Tim Tebow during his improbable playoff run with Denver in the 2011 season. Casual observers could look at Tebow’s stats and at his play and easily recognize that this man was not cut out to win at the NFL level. He was so bad at throwing and he was even worse at reading defenses. Somehow, he won games anyway. It made less and less sense as time went on and the wins accumulated. Chuck Klosterman wrote about the Tebow experience and he included a passage that applies perfectly to the Duck! Destruction Tour as well:

“The machinations of his success don’t matter as long as they’re inexplicable...It’s the ongoing choice between embracing a warm feeling that makes no sense or a cold pragmatism that’s probably true…[B]ut Tebow wrecks all that, because he makes blind faith a viable option.”

The success of Duck! signals a welcome return to what originally made BattleBots so wacky and enjoyable. Like Duck!, the current incarnation of BattleBots doesn’t seem to care about why it’s succeeding or the ultimate degree to which it does succeed as long as it enjoys the ride.

Viewership for the show has dropped below a million fans per episode in the last two seasons after routinely drawing an average of 1.5 million per episode in early seasons and generally between 3 and 5 million per episode in 2015 and 2016. While the 2016 finale alone drew 5.61 million, the most viewed episode this season pulled in just 997,000. It’s worth noting that these depressed numbers are perhaps primarily attributable to the show’s transition from network television to more niche locations on the dial. Each of ABC’s current most viewed summer shows draw in larger audiences than any current season episodes of BattleBots while still drawing fewer than Bots did back when it ran on ABC. Among the shows are Reef Break, Child Support, Indigo Point, and 1969. One of those is a show I just made up. Despite the reduced audience relative to ABC, Discovery and Science have been thrilled with the viewership of Bots and it ranks among their most popular shows. These channels provide a better home for Bots than ABC ever could anyway.

In the opinion of Trey Roski, an original co-founder of Bots, “Discovery is the TV network where BattleBots has always belonged.” Discovery doesn’t have the cash or the draw of ABC but it has something else: an audience smarter than the general public that is legitimately interested in nuanced, nerdy programming. “This is a sport for smart people,” adds Roski, echoing Liebling, “it’s the place to show off your imagination, your engineering prowess, and art.” Imagination is not something you’ll often find on ABC, and nor for that matter are engineering prowess or art.

During Bots’ original run on Comedy Central in the early 2000s, its creators worried that the network built on jokes would turn their passion project into a joke as well. Though the show rated well on the strength of huge initial interest from a previously unengaged demographic, too many gimmicks crept in to retain these newcomers. The show included zany sketches between fights and adorned the broadcast with Super Hot Babes™ that made BattleBots less an expression of engineering passion than a copycat sideshow targeting mainstream sports fans. “The skits and the scantily clad women turned off a lot of the people who watched the show for the robots,” said Brett Dawson, builder of the bot “Mobius.” Such corporatization and homogenization was temporarily good for business but it wasn’t good for the sport itself.

“In the last season or two [on Comedy Central], it became less of a sport and more of an entertainment vehicle,” agreed Greg Munson, one of the other Bots co-founders along with Roski. On Discovery and Science, there is no longer a mandate to turn BattleBots into something it isn’t, and while there’s no overt comedy quota, the show remains quite funny. The difference now is that the silliness is not derived from staged gags but rather from how seriously the stakeholders take the competition. BattleBots essentially asks highly skilled engineers to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars building weaponized Roombas to capture “The Giant Nut.” That premise is funny enough on its own. Adding sketches only puts a hat on a hat.

Despite the show’s comfort on its new home, I’m sure the worry of selling out looms. I’d be surprised if the Battle Box weren’t wrapped in ads like hockey boards in the next season of the show and you can currently find plenty of merch on the show’s website. Still, it finally seems the stakeholders at the bot building level and the showrunning level have aligned. No longer do purist builders resent the commodification of their passion project and no longer are TV executives greedily trying to engineer an age of robot fighting monoculture. Things are good.
Back in the living room, our watch party braces for Faruq’s latest introductions. Outside observers would probably call our joy juvenile but like the show itself, we have stopped caring about what anyone else thinks of Bots. The only people who critique others for childish glee are those that have forgotten how fun it is. BattleBots is the only time I get to gather with like-minded, well-read idiots to ignore everyone else and focus on something that makes us all happy, even if it’s incredibly lame. Turning into an insane person to root for toaster ovens to win or lose me tiny sums of money is often the best part of my week and I accept that it is profoundly uncool. Where coolness rejects vulnerability, joy relies on it. The point is this: You should care about stupid things sometimes. Now put your money on the table, I’m betting the farm on Duck!.